are not priests but men-good brave men-of the laity yet reverent; appointed for their task, divinely in a sense too, and that task they hold by with a purpose and a decision alike honouring to them and to us; each working

in his particular way as if solemnly consecrated for his work and for nothing else.

London, June 10th, 1865.

A. H. J.

THREE GREAT TEACHERS.

THOMAS CARLYLE,

HIS MISSION AND INFLUENCE.

CLASSIFICATION in these days has literally run mad. As we bottle up our different chemical elements, and label them separately and severally, for the better practical service afterwards, so would we do with human souls, if we could. When a new book appears, the author must be classified, preparatory even to his being reviewed; when a new truth is attained, it is only accepted in so far as it can be made a new label under which other things are to be hereafter for a time ranged and distributed. In short, we are much too scientific and unpoetical, in the true sense of that word, and shortsightedly carry our notions derived from the material sphere into the spiritual also. Thereby we

91

If,

do great mischief, and retard real progress. For even our classifications of nature are not, and must not be regarded as final; but only as more or less approximately true, needing to be constantly revised and, consequently, new arrangements and distributions of our accumulated resources are inevitable and certain. Nature, too, is spiritual and inexhaustible, and resolutely refuses to be treated of as mechanical merely; and hence the perpetual noisy pother about new discoveries, rival sections in science, and so forth. then, the rigidly conservative classifying tendency has done mischief in the physical, how much more must it have done so when carried into the moral and spiritual! Our metaphysics and theology alike tend to make us more sturdy labellers than even our material science, driving us to dwell and rejoice in sectional and halffalse views of things, so that we threaten to become even blind to the broad, the inclusive, the universal, the human. The first question the theologians put of a book, or of a man either, is not whether the book is good and the spirit high; or of the man-is he a nobly struggling, devout, pious soul; but rather is he or it Calvinistic or Arminian? The metaphysicians in the same way question-Is he or it Baconian or Berkeleyan, Hegelian or Hamiltonian? Finding that the book or the man does not happen to be either, then from all the various points of the shifting compass of criticism come blasts of condemnation.